Planted bowl help please:)

Alright, so not to long ago I posted a thread on here saying how me and my little brother were going to start a planted bowl (2g) for him cause he was interested. It's been set up for 2 days now, plan on doing water changed every 2 to 3 days, about 25%. I want the bowl to fill in and have plants thrive. I have a 60W bulb desk lamp that I keep on for 8 hours a day and there is Eco-complete substrate. As of now I just have some java moss and micro sword (friend gave em to me even though i know they need higher lighting)

Here are similar tanks to what I would like to achieve and I hope is not impossible (not necessarily the exact same thing)

Really like the last one, what plant does he have carpeting the bottom in the front? and the one in the back?

Well my main question here is what plants would grow best and thrive in a bowl like this? Also I was thinking about dosing ferts but I was told for a 2 gallon bowl its not necessary. Thanks a bunch and if you have a similar project, please share :)

aluka nailed it with the 13w bulb, i have a bowl currently and have a 13w over it, plants respond well. Do you have a picture of your bowl? When i started my bowl i threw in a couple ramshorn snails right away and was doing 50% water changes every other day. I was checking the water parameters every other day to. So as a couple weeks went by i went form doing 50% water changes to maybe30% water changes every other day and then today was water change day and i tested the water and the water was perfect, no need to do a water change today. Ill still monitor the water every other day as there are a bunch of ramshorn snails, like 10 shrimp and 2 black molly fry (which i regret putting in as i cant catch them) i dont want them in there anymore. They are fun and easy to keep under control as long as u stay on top of it

Generally these types of bowls goes into a stage where you just top off the water and chance it every 3-6 months. But you have to condition it to that point.

Like tattooedfool83, add some residents (snail or shrimps, i won't suggest fish unless its one betta), water change every other day for about 2 weeks, then every 3 days for 2-4 weeks, then once a week for 3-6 weeks, then once every other week, so on and so forth.

This is without testing the water. You can do it with much better accuracy if you test the water before every scheduled water change to see if you can skip it or not.

This only works if you have appropriate amount of plants. Meaning you have to have enough plants that can consume all the waste produce by your residents.

Of course if you are looking to have a sparsely planted bowl, then you should stick to a more rigorous water change schedule.

Thanks guys, you've helped me out before tattooedfool, so thanks for that. When I went to homedepot I was looking for bulbs but I couldn't find anything that said how many k's the bulbs were, maybe I didn't look hard enough. I'll go see if I can find that 13w 6500k bulb, is CLF a brand?

I'm planning to do shrimp in it as well. I'm guessing shrimp excrete waste at a different rate? Still trying to learn about them.

The bottom carpet is micro sword, which grows like a weed so it works well in a bowl but will take over. Lighting wise I used a 9 watt 6500k CFL. No ferts or anything like that. Like comet said the stem is pennywort, clumps of java moss and it's hard to see but in the back there is a red tiger lotus.

The bottom carpet is micro sword, which grows like a weed so it works well in a bowl but will take over. Lighting wise I used a 9 watt 6500k CFL. No ferts or anything like that. Like comet said the stem is pennywort, clumps of java moss and it's hard to see but in the back there is a red tiger lotus.

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